At a time of high mortgage rates and inflation, the federal government — along with government-sponsored enterprises — is understandably under pressure to lower costs and make homeownership more accessible. We share the goal of improving housing affordability. However, any effort to lower housing costs should be responsibly examined for
Read more
First Citizens Bank & Trust Company will acquire failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which unexpectedly failed earlier this month and sent shock waves across the financial sector. The North Carolina-based First Citizens announced on Monday an agreement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to acquire all of SVB’s deposits
Read more
The financial and housing markets are still trying to sort out the banking crisis and whether we have seen the last Fed rate hike in this cycle. These events led to lower mortgage rates and increased purchase application data last week, but decreased housing inventory. The 10-year yield and mortgage
Read more
ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm over the past few months. It took Netflix 3.5 years to reach one million users, Facebook ten months and Spotify five months. ChatGPT got to the first million users in five days. In two months after that, ChatGPT reached 100
Read more
When you google “appraisal gap” — and I just did — a long list of search results appear. To my surprise, the top results did not link to economists expounding on the intricacies of home price fluctuations, the leading theories on avoiding overvaluation or pictures of stunt riders jumping over
Read more
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) released on Thursday its Fourth Quarter 2022 Foreclosure Prevention and Refinance Report, stating that government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac completed 52,469 foreclosure prevention actions in Q4 2022. That figure increases the total number of GSE-assisted homeowners to 6,712,833 since the start
Read more
2022 was a roller coaster year, continuing the strong pandemic and post-pandemic fueled housing market through the first half of the year. Then, in the third quarter, we saw an abrupt stop to the record-breaking housing market. Despite market headwinds, the top brokerages continued to show growth in the 2023
Read more
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, comprising the districts of Connecticut, New York and Vermont, decided on Thursday that the funding provisions for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are constitutional. A case between the CFPB and the Law Offices of Crystal Moroney — a law
Read more
With current market conditions having a negative impact on traditional agency loans, expanding into non-QM products can allow brokers to grow their business and reach a wider borrower pool. But what’s the best way for brokers to market themselves to reach that wider, non-QM audience? According to Hitz Mistry, chief
Read more
If there’s one sector of the economy that benefits from the very low levels of total housing inventory, it’s the homebuilders, but for a reason you might not think. If national housing inventory were back to normal, we would have 2 to 2.5 million active listings, and these active listings
Read more
The ongoing tumult in the banking industry brought to light by the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — the second and third largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively — also threatens liquidity channels for the independent mortgage banks (IMBs). Two banks that rank among the nation’s top warehouse lenders
Read more
The collapses of Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the rescue of First Republic Bank and the acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS, brought turbulence to the financial markets that led to a decline in mortgage rates – despite the Federal Reserve hiking federal funds rate by 25
Read more